I have categorically refused to build a web business based on advertising revenue. Eventually I had to ask myself “why”, and this is what I came up with – I find advertising repugnant, EXCEPT when it’s about something I want.
A little light went off in my head – I know how to hack google adsense to display ads based on a given keyword. I know how to use greasemonkey to edit the pages I’m browsing. And I know how to get my recent search history out of google. Why not combine these – a greasemonkey script that rewrites google adsense to be ads for products matching my recent search history? It could even be customized with a keyword list of my own devising.
I can’t imagine google would object – the ads will still be there, they’ll just be better.
Thoughts?
#1 by Joshua McKenty on 14Dec07 - 1:08 am
Quick note – I whipped together a simple version of this. It simply uses my blog as the source for keywords of interest to me, and rewrites all the google adsense iframes on the page to match.
Future improvements:
Make it an extension, so it can capture the outgoing google iframe call (no double loading).
Mix the content of the page into the keywords somehow.
Note that I’m specifically NOT rewriting the client ID – that would be stealing from the page owners, and therefore bad, m’kay?
#2 by Joshua McKenty on 14Dec07 - 2:17 am
Gone a bit farther again – added a “delete” button next to each ad, which I’ll use to save the URL in GM. Not sure what to do with it, though – either I build a client/server solution where I push those URLs back into the keyword page (in some microformat for exclusion), and wait for the Google refresh, or I delete the ads as they come in.
I have a feeling that I’ll end up pulling adsense with XHR, decomposing the ads and displaying them manually. Which feels… bad.
The alternative is to push the limits of the adsense URL parameters. Anyone know good tricks there?
#3 by Joshua McKenty on 14Dec07 - 2:35 am
I’ve added the script to userscripts.org, at http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/16424 – it’s primitive and incomplete, but I think it shows what’s possible. Anyone want to help?
#4 by Doug Ransom on 15Dec07 - 10:26 am
You may find advertising repugnant. I think an important question to consider is how does your target market feel about ads? You may find your target user base simply considers advertising boring.
No doubt viewing ads is undesirable for almost everyone, but free service like web search or facebook provides more than enough value to make up for it. The cost to me ignoring an ad on a google search is $0.0005. On facebook, is probably closer to 0.005 because the ad may actually distract me from achieving whatever it is I am trying to do on facebook.
I wonder how much Google could make selling memberships, which include ad-free web searching?
#5 by admin on 24Dec07 - 1:31 pm
I’ve obviously explained myself poorly – it’s SIMPLE to remove ads. AdBlock does it quite well. I don’t WANT to take them away, for the simple fact that they pay for the internet. I just want them to be more interesting to me.
This first attempt does it in a very primitive way – it simply makes every google adwords ad I see, look like it’s about a single site – one that *I* pick. I’ll have to get more sophisticated later on.